Dr. David Zeevi
Independent Fellow, Rockerfeller University, Center for Studies in Physics & Biology
Research Website
Mining the marine microbiome for remediation targets: lessons from the human microbiome
Thursday, February 20, 2 PM, RRI 101
Abstract: Microbial communities can have an immense effect on their environment and are strongly affected by it. Using new methods for metagenomic sequencing analysis, we systematically identified microbial genomic structural variants and found them to be highly prevalent in the gut microbiome and to correlate with disease risk factors (Zeevi et al., Nature 2019). Our results suggest that these variants facilitate adaptation to environmental stress. Exploring genes that are clustered in the same variant, we uncovered potential mechanistic links between microbiome and its host. Inspired by our discovery of potential microbial adaptation to host pressures, I developed a strategy for mining marine microbiome samples for novel bioremediation genes. To this end, we devised a high-throughput evolutionary analysis, and revealed an unexpected insight into the structure of our genetic code (Shenhav and Zeevi, bioRxiv 2019). Our primary analyses uncovered overwhelmingly strong purifying selective pressure across marine microbial life. This selection was highly correlated with nutrient concentrations and has led us to explore robustness in the genetic code, common to nearly all life forms. We show that the structure of the genetic code, along with amino acid choices across all kingdoms of Life, confers robustness to mutations that incorporate additional nitrogen and carbon into protein sequences. By accounting for this nutrient-conservation-driven purifying selection, we will be able to expose a new layer of selection associated with marine pollution.
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